Hero
by tami3
Summary: Ingame scene. In the world of Hollow Bastion, there is only quiet and gray, an invitation to die in your sleep. Why did Riku bring Kairi there? Did he ever understand what it means to be a hero? Abstract, plotless, and complex. Be warned.


To Understand A Hero

What do we do when there is a problem, and do not understand the origin?

Suppose there are people out there, beyond those who laugh at the display of violence, but get cold feet when it comes too close. These people who have pain as a perspective rather than a plaything do not think tragedy has no explanation. They know an answer is available, if not out of their reach in some obscure source.

The first one to battle this ignorance, and win, is a hero.

Someone once said: "Before him people just repeated what they had heard about the past and did not bother to find out the truth."

Someone stupid and unbroken, dwelling on all the lessons society had instructed him, asked back: "And what is truth?" He was unaware of how wrong having to challenge the mission statement was. An insubordinate.

"The truth-what really happened-what people really did and really said" And meant too, although the hero did not bother explaining that to the person who had not known that in the first place. "Not what a divine force made them do, but what greed and lust for power made them do."

"Are we that terrible?" The questioner had responded.

He was ignored. Thank God. And the hero walked away, to start his crusade.

This was his new domain, a place where water defied its nature and found no need for its own limitations of adhesion and cohesion. Without heroes to welcome home from campaigns, or fairy residents to maintain an inhabitable charm, the cathedral palace exuded a mineral austereness to visitors. It had tired of salutes to chivalry without even voicing them once.

It was inhospitable, almost sterile. There were no birds, only their afterimages of their wings from a distant past. The aerial specters gave a phantom projection against the smooth walls, something lonely and gray. Their pinions, detached from a fantasized takeoff, gave a coarse watermark to the stones, which wove the building into the strings of a colorless loom. When the rocks surface went blank, it was if shears had snipped the yarns in two, and they had been yanked out.

Riku liked it.

"See, Kairi? The water's flowing upside down. Stick your hand in, it's cool."

She was not a comatose vessel to him; Maleficeint was motherly in the worst way, smiling with eerie approval at his actions and cackling about them behind her hand before he was even out of earshot. It pained him that the person who probably was the most knowledgeable about the condition Kairi was in was so amused by his attempts to keep her company in her worst moments. Not only did she outright say that it was pointless, she'd asked him if he had some fascination with playing with cadavers.

"I have plenty of those in the backroom." She taunted. "Perhaps you'd like to switch for one of them temporarily? She can stay with the rest of them until you're ready to take her back again. Do you want to be a mortician, hmm, is that it? It's much better to be familiar with all sorts instead of dragging around the same one everywhere."

She hadn't made that complex or taunting of a comment to Riku. It had been more or less a typical conversation between the two. It was just unfortunate that her sense of humor correlated with every other aspect of her nature; poisonous.

Besides that, Riku had no need for the witch woman to say that it was useless. Riku had been able to draw the connections, all on his own. It had been creative of him, to notice how Kairi really was wasting away like a corpse, stiffening now and then as if having spasms of rigor mortis through and through

And they were about to dissect her, to see what had gone wrong inside.

Those were bad thoughts to be entertaining on an outing. Kairi didn't move very much nowadays, not on her own, anyways. If she could, Riku would lead her down the stairs from her room, step by step and holding her hands all the way. It could take half the day for her to totter through the door outside. Riku always wanted her to try on her own, to regain some of her independence, but her motor skills were visibly waning. He carried her if she obstinately refused to move, lounging lethargically on the marble tiles and fighting him with dead weight to lie down.

But once outside in the sunshine, which slipped through the constant, but barren, storm front like dusty arms, she cheered. Looking at her, Riku thought she looked just as pretty beneath the dirty light as she ever did, shaded grayscale or not.

This time, her hand reached out towards the direction of the silent splashes, robbed of their voice. Their essence had been sucked into an obliterating vacuum like everything else in this dimension.

Although it was true that any action of Kairi's under her stupor seemed to be involuntary, like faint, unenthused seizures, this time she had frozen. Riku took her arm, concerned, but not too much, about whether or not she was having some form of a stroke. It was the feeling of this world. It tired even him, but kept him jadedly peaceful. He always felt ill, but rested. As if he'd slept so long his muscles had begun to melt, coaxing him to believe that it was okay, this fatigue. If he kept still, the atmosphere promised to wash over him live a wave of resin and preserve him forever in an amber capsule. He was a bug, or as insignificant as one, but at least he'd kept pretty well.

Riku had to shake his head hard to clear his thoughts of the droning nonsense.

Kairi was sitting on the ground, synthetic slabs of stone, but she kept her arm outstretched. Riku watched her idly; there wasn't anything to threaten them out here, unless you counted the mental suffocation of silence upon gray upon numbness. He could sit and be sedate as he liked, because what else was there to do and who was left to shock you out of it? Maybe that was the problem here. Take an unconscious person to a morgue, and what else could you expect them to do but sleep on? But with Kairi so drab, so stubbornly flat, it didn't seem right to scare her back into being vibrant again. Even deciding that, as Riku stared at her, he wondered that if she did return at this moment, would she cry at waking up to this?

And then, amazingly…

At the end of her extended hand, Kairi's fingers slowly curved like a net, as if to beckon. Riku whooped for one reason or another at this pitiful improvement in her behavior. He caught some of the sourceless river and dumped it in her palm. It ascended immediately, splashing his face as it levitated; then it rose into the air like a helium balloon, reducing itself to sparkling pinpricks in the sky.

"Did you feel that, Kairi?" He asked her as the drips on chin rolled upwards, quivering, towards his brow. "Neat, huh? It's just like the waterfall at home… Sort of."

Not a word. But there was a token gift of a blind-eyed look at Riku, as she turned his head in his direction without seeing him standing beside her.

Riku's stomach felt as if it had rolled around hollow. A grain shelled of the meal was a husk, a squash gutted of its flesh was a gourd. A Kairi with her soul sucked out- there was no word for it, but it was plenty worth keeping. He had nothing else to go on.

He looked up, his aqua eyes immersed in a creamy smoke batter of overcast.

_If you tell yourself something that doesn't turn out to be true, and acted under that false idea… does that mean you were lying to yourself, or just following your heart?_

Quotations in introduction paraphrased from Anna of Byzantium, by Tracy Barrett. Used without permission.

All Kingdom Hearts characters are copyrighted by Disney and SquareEnix. Also used without permission.


End file.
